The National Anthem

It took seven years, three trillion dollars and a million corpses, but America has finally transformed Iraq from a cruel dictatorship ruled by torture and ethnic cleansing into a cruel dictatorship ruled by torture and ethnic cleansing where select survivors are free to vote for the torturer of their choice. And Jesus said "It is accomplished!"

Is Iraq a democracy? Of course not. But is it close to becoming a democracy? Ha ha, no. But it certainly does resemble, from a distance, when we squint, the vague shape of a notion of the idea of something that contains one particular rote procedural aspect of democracy - albeit one that happens to be attached to a military dictatorship. And certainly that must be worth something. And for the sake of argument, let's say it's worth, oh, I don't know, everyone America has killed, bombed, starved, maimed and tortured in Iraq over the past two decades.

Because if it's not worth that, then that would mean the occupation of Iraq has not been a selfless nation-building project generously extended from the richest country in the world to one of the poorest, but a sustained and psychotic act of mass murder, a massive, nationwide industrial slaughter that deserves its place among history's great atrocities. And if that's the case, we might find, on closer inspection, more and more American entries in those ranks, from Iraq to Nicaragua to Chile to Vietnam to Korea to Japan to the Philippines to the Trail of Tears. And that would make the United States not an enormous force for good in the world but a monster of world-historical proportions, our leaders gore-guzzling psychopaths who wipe the blood from their chins just long enough to collect the occasional Nobel Prize, and ourselves their numbed, acquiescent followers. And we know that can't be the case, because look at all the good we're doing in Afghanistan.